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Book Reviewed by:
Elisabeth Cook
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The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human--even funny. The people: Divided.
The angel-fair "Netted" have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The "Surplus" live on swampland if they're lucky, on water if they're not.
The story: To a Surplus couple--he once a professor, she still a lawyer--is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten, she can hit whatever target she likes. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league.
When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics, though--with a special eye on beating ChinRussia--Gwen attracts interest. Soon she finds herself playing ball with the Netted even as her mother challenges the very foundations of this divided society.
A moving and important story of an America that seems ever more possible, The Resisters is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity and normalcy in circumstances that threaten their every value--as well as their very existence.
Extraordinary and ordinary, charming and electrifying, this is Gish Jen at her most irresistible.
Part I
A Girl with a Golden Arm
As her parents, Eleanor and I should have known earlier. But Gwen was a preemie, to begin with. That meant oxygen at first and, after that, special checkups. And her early months were bumpy. She had jaundice; she had roseola; she had colic. She had a heart murmur. Things that I can now see distracted us—especially with the One Chance Policy, we were focused on her health to the exclusion of all else. For the Netted, it was different, of course, but for us Surplus, the limit was one pregnancy per couple, and Eleanor was just out of jail. Outside the house, she had a DroneMinder tracking her every move; the message was clear. She was not getting away with anything.
And in any case, we loved Gwen and would never have wanted to replace her, worried though we were that she was delicate—that she might never consume the way she needed to, the way we all needed to. Not that charges of underconsumption couldn't be fought in the courts. This was ...
Jen effectively blends nostalgia for a mythical American past with the anxiety of a consumerist country forever reaching for the future, creating a society with new quirks that nevertheless doesn't feel that dissimilar from our own. At times, the book's world-building gets in the way of its plot development. Much more than a cautionary tale, The Resisters feels like a generous space to sit with the sadder truths of our consumption-driven society...continued
Full Review
(783 words).
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
The Resisters is palpably loving, smart, funny and desperately unsettling. The novel should be required reading for the country, both as a cautionary tale and because it is a stone-cold masterpiece. This is Gish Jen's moment. She has pitched a perfect game. Stephen King, author of The Institute
An absolute joy...I finished The Resisters with a tear in my eye and a smile on my face...Gish Jen has written a one-of-a-kind book with great characters—especially Eleanor, who is the heart of the story—and a warm heart. Allegra Goodman, author of The Chalk Artist
Inventive, funny, and tender, The Resisters is about family, baseball, and the future—but more than anything, it is about freedom, and it is about us—here, now. Jean Kwok, author of Searching for Sylvie Lee
Brilliant...A heartbreaking novel with the sensitivity, emotional range, and prophetic power of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
In Gish Jen's The Resisters, people live in AutoHouses, internet-linked homes that are capable of performing certain automated tasks for their inhabitants, such as cleaning up dropped objects and regulating temperature, but that are also used for government surveillance. While the homes in Jen's novel operate at a much more advanced level than current technology, smart homes, or houses in which devices are connected to a digital network, are already very much a reality. These homes, along with smart appliances and other everyday objects that are linked through wireless systems, are sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT).
Non-wireless home automation can be traced back to 1975, when a Scottish company, Pico Electronics, ...
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